Evaluation - part 4

My use of media technologies in this project has ranged from using digital cameras to complicated video editing software to troubleshoot a wide variety of technical problems and I have learnt much about editing software, slide-show making software, animation software and equipment like the larger DV videocameras and use of hard lighting with the lamps.

During my research and production, I used the website www.polldaddy.com to gain feedback when canvassing our film concept and have used www.blogger.com to post the various stages of our project. I used Slideshare to illustrate various elements of production and create an animatic storyboard to preview how we intended our film to look, and Youtube to broadcast our final product to gain audience feedback, and Facebook to advertise this to my peers, aiding the evaluation process.

From relearning how best to use a digital stills camera for the type of high key shots we needed for the film poster to learning setting up the stands, poles and white sheet backdrop to reflect light and easily edit the images, learning to use the high-wattage photography lamps to control light for various effects was one of the most useful skills I learnt with technology. Using the Photoshop to create our sub-tasks was an enjoyable and fruitful process for us, as we had used the software before and using layers and the many effects and adjustment possibilities Photoshop offers,

Using the videocameras was an enlightening process as we discovered which were the best settings and effects to capture the type of look we needed on our film, and editing three hours worth of footage and retakes into a short film was where I became proficient in using Final Cut Pro. Initially we had to upload the footage using iMovie as the Final Cut software was not functioning correctly. Final Cut did have its many limitations and problematic obstacles but we overcame these by using iMove to resolve these then reimporting back into Final Cut. Many problems we came across like difficulty in hearing the sound and needing to disguise the daylight through the windows were resolved using Final Cut's blue-green eliminator, as well as dubbing the audio from other takes over a few of Jim's lines as the best take visually was ruined with too much restaurant ambient noise interfering with the dialogue. What seemed like unfixable issues we learnt to rectify with editing software, however in importing then reimporting and converting the file between the two softwares we did compromise some of the quality noticeably.

Our use of garageband in recording the narrative voice-over of our film was crucial as the poor quality microphone picked up too much breath, "p's" and "s's", and garageband had certain effects and programs we could use to disguise flaws and improve the quality to aid the overall success of our film. Finally, our use of the in built webcams on the mac computers we were using were especially useful in gathering multimedia footage of audience feedback.

The issues I had with blogger when posting the project's process were very frustrating as it was difficult to see the progression of the task chronologically, as it would display the posts backwards from the most recent and divide them into monthly sections. Also its very basic limitations on how we could display our work, i.e image size and it's complicated and way of formatting the layout made me find I spent more time trying to get the blog look coherent and presentable than I would have liked, and prefer iWeb or even Livejournal.com to blogger. However, it was accessible and convenient to use at home, so we learnt to use it as effectively as possible and put up with any issues.